Sadly, you may be right there. While a lot of larger publishers are moving towards progressively more intrusive ads, smaller ones definitely seem to me moving in the other direction. (Just look at the growth of BuySellAds.com as an example. They make a point of not accepting Flash-based ads.) Unfortunately, the massive amounts of people using the EasyList filter for ABP are blocking them, whether they know it or not. (EasyList not only has a rule blocking BuySellAds, but one specific to my domain…)

Unfortunately, I suspect that a lot of sites will resort to those awful full-page ads with "click here to continue…" hidden on the page somewhere (or worse, "you will be redirected to the page you were expecting in X seconds…") before they'll think about making ads less intrusive. Or maybe the entire internet will become pay-only except a few scattered hobby sites. I'd love to be proven wrong though.

Perhaps the damage is already done anyway – even if virtually every site in existence does away with the overly annoying ads, Adblock users won't notice because they'll have them blocked already by some indiscriminate ad filter. It would at least provide less incentive for more people to install an ad blocker, though.

I've used adblock programs before and they normally block legitimate pop-ups as well.

Yes, that does seem to be a problem. And I believe AdBlock is just the tool for the job there. Enough people blocking them will eventually push things to the point where they are forced to rethink things.

I think networks like http://buysellads.com, http://fusionads.net/, or http://decknetwork.net/ should be off-limits to ad blocking though. (And let's not forget the sites that don't even use a network, and take the time to see to the quality of their ads by hand.) The trouble is, as things stand, many people running AdBlock aren't even aware of these much more reasonable advertisements…